


The Awful Secret Behind The Universe

by guttersvoice



Category: Homestuck, John Dies at the End - David Wong
Genre: Crossover, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 03:58:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guttersvoice/pseuds/guttersvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they’re out on a late-night walk because neither of them can sleep, they run across a street magician.<br/>At least, they assume he’s a street magician – he does some magic for them, to John’s delight. He’s Jamaican, or at least he’s trying really hard to be, and he floats about a foot in the air. John demands to know how it’s done, insisting that he’s a magician, too, and pulls a coin from behind Mr Marley’s ear to prove it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just to note: this may not be John/Dave in the end, but I figure it's best to pre-emptively tag such things, right?  
> Uh yeah this crossover has been explored but never made concrete in fic form yet as far as I can tell, so I decided I should probably get round to it.

John and Dave wind up living together a few years after all the SBURB bullshit is over, in a city in the Midwest whose name shall remain undisclosed for the purpose of this story.

They’ve both tried college and realised it’s just not right for them.

Most of the world isn’t right for them. They’ve been gods and they’ve died multiple times and they’ve destroyed, saved, and created universes. An ordinary life just feels wrong now.

So they find a cheap-ass flat in this shitty-ass city, and they try to get jobs while living on John’s ridiculous trust fund and the metric ton of boondollars Dave raked in during the game. They could probably live on that forever, really, but it doesn’t seem fair somehow, and besides, they’d stagnate if they didn’t go out and actually do stuff once in a while.

Getting jobs isn’t particularly hard in [Undisclosed]. Keeping them is another question. Dave goes through five fast-food restaurants in three weeks, fired mainly because of his ‘attitude’, although his refusal to take the shades off is probably a factor.

John works in a bookshop, a video rental place, and a diner before he eventually lands a permanent job in a tiny music store, sitting and playing keyboard for most of the day. Dave pops in to see him most days, since he’s ‘between jobs’.

They get mugged occasionally, and one time a guy tried to stab John and wound up in a dumpster in an alley with a large lump to the head – they don’t know if their immortality carried over post-game, and they aren’t willing to try. Their other powers didn’t, not properly. John always knows what the weather is like, and what way the wind is blowing, and Dave always knows what time it is, but that’s about it.

And then, when they’re out on a late-night walk because neither of them can sleep, they run across a street magician.

At least, they assume he’s a street magician – he does some magic for them, to John’s delight. He’s Jamaican, or at least he’s trying really hard to be, and he floats about a foot in the air. John demands to know how it’s done, insisting that he’s a magician, too, and pulls a coin from behind Mr Marley’s ear to prove it.

Dave is significantly less enthusiastic, and tries to get John to leave it alone, pulls at his arm to get him to leave.

Robert pulls a centipede out from behind Dave’s ear, and makes it disappear. Dave doesn’t know where it’s gone, and he’s not sure he wants to.

John is absolutely spellbound, and Robert promises that if John buys him a beer, he’ll tell him how he does it.

Dave realises it’s going to be a long night. But it's John, and he's always got time for John and his whims, and he knows where the nearest bar is, so he leads the way, and as they walk, Robert talks to him about the dream he had last night. Not that Dave needs reminding. It was another Dave’s dream, one that ended in his throat being slit by Noir, and Marley describes it in perfect detail.

Dave wants to punch him, but it’d only get him in trouble, and now his curiosity has been sparked, too.

He buys the fake Jamaican a beer, gets one for himself and for John, too, and Robert tells them about Soy Sauce.

\----  
\-------------  
\----

It’s 4:13 am, twelve-and-a-sixth seconds past the minute, and Dave doesn’t even notice the significance of the time because he’s just waking up with a splitting headache and very fuzzy memories of the night before. At first he assumes it’s just because of the beer, but then there’s something scuttling in the corner of his room.

On the ceiling.

His sword is out in an instant, but it's already gone. Even if it hadn't disappeared so fast, he'd have been too slow: he almost drops his katana in surprise, because the handle is all sticky.

Except that it’s not – his hands are what’s sticky, and he knows the texture immediately, is intimately familiar with it, doesn’t even have to turn the lights on to know that he’s red up to the elbows.

And he doesn’t know where John is.

And he doesn’t know what he did last night, up to buying that fake Jamaican his fourth beer. There's a good six hours, twelve minutes of missing time there, and that's an entirely new sensation for Dave.

He finds himself woozy and disoriented for a minute, and has to close his eyes to steady himself. It takes 15 and three-quarters of a second. This precision isn’t unusual, but closing his eyes gives him the clarity to realise that he knows that the blood on his hands is human, that it is type O-Negative (but he’s never cared about blood types, he doesn’t even know his own, and he regrets that for a moment, and regrets even more that this new knowledge isn’t giving him the answer to that, too.) and that he acquired the coating to his hands at 1:12 am, an hour and twenty-three minutes before he fell asleep. He knows the exact chemical makeup of the blood, and that it is slightly zinc deficient, and really low in vitamin D. He knows that the former owner of this blood had spaghetti bolognese for dinner, and then drank a lot.

He and John had spaghetti bolognese last night, Dave remembers, and has to sit back down on the sofa where he apparently passed out. He almost puts his head in his hands, but catches himself a moment before his sticky red palms make contact with his face.

This is a problem. This is a real and definite problem, and he isn’t really prepared to face up to whatever happened last night.

So he doesn’t, not right away. Instead, he goes to take a shower. After he’s clean and dressed and maybe after a coffee, he might be ready to actually think about this.

About halfway through his shower – after he’s scrubbed all the blood and dirt off, and he’s just about to wash out his conditioner – his phone rings from the bathroom floor. Any other day, he’d leave it. Anyone ringing him could always wait till he was clean.

But the ringtone is Aerosmith’s “Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”, the song John set for himself that Dave never had the heart to change to something less shitty, and Dave almost breaks a few bones leaping out of the bath to pick it up.

“John?” He’s almost afraid to ask it.

“Hey Dave!” 

It is John, and the sound of his voice sends a wave of relief right through Dave. He practically deflates, allowing himself to smile and sigh and run his hand through his hair (which is still full of conditioner. he wipes it on last night’s t-shirt.). No one’s here to see him display the emotion.

The relief disappears quickly, however. John is frantic, though not panicked. He’s speaking way too fast.

“Dave, wipe that adorable secret smile off your face and hurry up washing the conditioner out of your hair, then get your ass to Denny’s, we need to – shit, you’re still barred from Denny’s, uh, McDonald’s, then – we have to figure out some way of finding it!”

“Finding what?” Dave asks slowly, hoping that’ll be enough to let John know that he’s not making any sense. Or that he’s making too much sense. Dave can’t quite decide which.

“No, time, Dave, you of all people should know that! And don’t talk to me while you’re naked, dude.”

He hangs up, leaving Dave entirely confused.

John’s right about them having hardly any time, though. There’s a countdown ticking away at the back of his head, and they’ve got just over two days until…something. He doesn’t know what. Or doesn’t remember. It hardly matters at this point, he supposes, climbing back into the bath to finish washing his hair and wondering how John knew all that shit. Probably the same reason Dave keeps remembering facts that he’s pretty sure he’s never known, and has never had any need to know. Like the average circumference of a golden retriever’s skull, or the load capacity of an airborne African swallow.

He towels off, and gets dressed, shoving five different swords into his sylladex, because today’s events so far have only suggested bad news to him, and also grabbing a few cartons of apple juice, just in case. There’s a Bible that he’s pretty sure he hasn’t seen before on the shelf where they keep the keys, and though it looks half-chewed by…something large. He feels the urge to bring that along too, and so he captchalogues that, too.

At this point, he isn’t questioning anything his mind is telling him. He hasn’t involuntarily thought anything dangerous, after all. Not yet, at least.

Not as far as he’s aware.

He’s dressed sensibly – it’s late autumn, so he needs a hoodie and a scarf. [Undisclosed] is so cold compared to Houston. That’s probably the only thing that Dave dislikes about the city. Other than the homelessness problem. And the stray dogs with the mutations. And the drain smell. And the price you have to pay for a bratwurst.

Ok, no, it’s a shithole, he admits to himself, his mind mapping out the sewer system below his feet lightning-fast as he walks to McDonald’s, although he’s never even thought about the city having a particularly complex sewer system before today. Hell, he’s never even really thought about sewer systems full stop.

He passes thirteen crows on his walk, and another four miscellaneous birds – two starlings, a pigeon, and a dying blackbird.

There are about three McDonald’s in [Undisclosed], and as usual, John is in the last one he tries.

John is sporting a black eye and has grazes on his elbows, but is otherwise relatively unharmed, at least as far as Dave can tell. He’s hunched over a Big Mac, and is devouring it at a rate that makes it seem like he hasn’t eaten for days. There’s a Hello Kitty hairclip keeping his bangs out of his eyes.

Dave sits down and takes a couple of fries from John’s meal.

“Two days, five hours, thirty-three minutes and forty…five seconds till what?” He asks eventually, since John is clearly waiting for him to speak, and John swallows his mouthful of hamburger to grin widely at him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this took basically forever, sorry.

It’s not John’s normal grin, though, not the grin of ‘hehehe, i know something you don’t!’; it’s a confused ‘are you joking?’ grin, and Dave’s never seen that look on his best friend’s face before.

“I thought you were going to tell me what’s going on,” he says, and Dave gets an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach. This apparently shows enough on his face – though John is getting a lot better at interpreting the tiny changes in Dave’s expression – for John to notice Dave’s lack of comprehension. “You’ve been calling me all night, dude.”

That missing time is really going to come back to bite him in the ass, isn’t it?

“You kept telling me we had to find something and that we didn’t have any time but you couldn’t find me at the right time. Or something, you were pretty garbled. You were calling me the whole way here.  I had to keep telling you we’d already arranged to meet.” John frowns, and there’s more worry in his eyes than Dave had expected, and he realises it’s because he’s forgotten to keep up the coolkid front and he’s letting the fear show on his face.

“I didn’t call you, John,” He has to explain, and he’s pretty sure John doesn’t believe him. “I had one phonecall from you, that’s the only time we’ve spoken since I woke up.”

Of course, it’s this exact moment that Snoop starts blaring from John’s pocket, making them both jump. John pulls his phone out and his face freezes; the caller display reads ‘Dave’. As if he hadn’t predicted that shitty twist already.

He brings out his own phone to confirm that he definitely isn’t the one ringing, and then plucks John’s phone from his hand, picking it up.

“John?” The voice at the other end is definitely his own – he’s met himself enough times to recognise it.

“Nah, it’s me,” he replies smoothly, somehow finding himself a lot more comfortable now that he knows that time shit is going on.

“Shit, is John ok?” The Dave at the other end of the phone is breathing heavily; he sounds frightened and very un-Striderlike.

“Yeah, he’s sat opposite me, we’re in Maccy D’s, five-twenty-three and fourteen in the AM. When are you?”

“One-thirty-five and thirty-two AM,” Past Dave says. Twenty-three minutes after he acquired the blood to his hands, Dave thinks. One hour before he fell asleep. “I can’t get myself oriented though, keep calling the wrong time. Left John a really great message in about two months, though. D’you know where it is yet?”

“I don’t even know what ‘it’ is, dude,” Dave replies. “Listen, next time you get a John, just tell him to call you back and arrange a meeting point.”

“He called you, right, yeah, I can do that. Listen, don’t go home, there’s something in the bedroom.”

“Tried to kill it earlier but it disappeared too fast.” It hadn’t been a hallucination, then? Dave isn’t sure if that’s a good or bad thing. He’s certainly not going to admit that he only didn’t get it in time because he almost dropped his sword. “What am I supposed to be finding?”

“It’s wearing off? Shit, man, you need more Sauce, ok? Get some more.”

Past Dave hangs up abruptly, leaving Dave incredibly dissatisfied. He slides the phone back across to John, who looks expectant. Dave prepares himself to let John down.

“Yeah, that’s me from one-thirty this morning,” he explains, and John nods. Neither of them are strangers to weird time shit, but it has been a while. “I wasn’t being very clear, all I got was that we’ve gotta get more sauce, whatever the fuck that means.”

John goes pale.

The ‘sauce’, Dave surmises, is a bad thing.

He waits for a minute, expecting John to make things a little bit clearer, but he sits in silence, burger halfway to his mouth. Expectant – clearly they both want the other to speak first, so Dave does the chivalrous thing.

“What is it?” he asks, which means ‘what is the sauce?’ but also ‘what’s wrong?’ John is still pale, and has set his burger down in its little cardboard packet, and he isn’t quite meeting Dave’s eyes.  He looks faintly nauseous, but he isn’t frowning. In fact, there’s a nervously excited little smile playing on his lips.

“You don’t remember last night at all, huh?” he chuckles and Dave isn’t sure if that’s amusement or fear. He figures it’s wiser to say nothing, and simply shakes his head, mouth a thin line. John nods in understanding, as if he were accepting that a child didn’t know how to read. “The side effects are wearing off on me, too, but I can remember most of it, at least. I’d be jealous of you, if it was that easy.”

He laughs, and there’s bitterness in the sound that Dave has never known John to display. He didn’t think he was even capable of that.

So far, that’s the thing that has frightened him the most today.

He opens his mouth to ask another question, but John stands up, closing the burger box and shoving in the voluminous pocket of his hoodie.

“We need to find more, right?” He’s as matter-of-fact as possible, but there’s an unmistakable twinge of that nervous excitement to his tone.

Dave wants to argue. He wants to insist that John stop and tell him what is actually going on. But there’s an insistent countdown ticking away in his head, pushing him onwards, so he follows John out of McDonald’s and onto the street.

\----  
\-------------  
\----

John pulls out the burger and bites into it as they walk past a railing with a murder of fourteen crows perched on it. They squawk greetings at Dave and he’s pretty sure there are actual words amongst the shrieking noises. They are not nice words, but he can’t quite make out what they mean. He’s pretty sure it’s a good thing that he can’t.

He can’t make out what John’s saying, either, but that’s mainly because his mouth is full of Big Mac.

“You’re gonna have to swallow before you speak,” he reminds John, who splutters a laugh around his mouthful but nods, chewing furiously. “So where are we going?”

Dave half expects a grin, but what he gets is more of a determined, grim expression.

“We have to find out where Robert lived,” John replies. This is not quite as clear as Dave wanted, but apparently John is able to interpret the slight movement of his eyebrows as confusion.  He rolls his eyes. “I told you, dude. The side effects are still partly affecting me, so I know the general direction we need to go in, right now. I mean, there’s some buildings in the way, so it’s not entirely clear, but it’s not like I can fly anymore, so we’re gonna have to hike it the long way round.”

He nods, as if agreeing with himself, and resumes devouring his burger, while this sinks in with Dave. Surely that’s not the easiest way of doing this?

“Could we at least get a cab? Do you even know how far we’re going to have to go?”

John’s eyes widen.

“Get in a vehicle with someone we don’t know? Are you kidding?”

For a moment, real fear hits Dave again, because John showing that sort of paranoia – the guy who flew a car with a Dersite he’d never met before – is unprecedented. But then John’s shocked expression stretches into a wide grin.

Dave has never been so glad that the Prankster’s Gambit is a thing John still doggedly sticks to.

They hail a cab.


End file.
